Nicholas Barang
Jul 26, 2017 · 2 min read

I don’t agree. Eliminating self-doubt doesn’t require you to be a robot or a billionaire. It requires you to accept who you are. That’s it.

If you accept that human beings make mistakes and that as long as you are acting on the best information you have in the best way you can think of; there’s no need for self-doubt. You’ll get stuff wrong at times but so what? That’s what humans do.

Why waste time worrying about things you cannot see? If people did that when they left the house in the morning, they’d never cross the road.

After all, no-one expects to get run over but people do get run over, don’t they? Self-doubt should leave you stranded on the sidewalk. It doesn’t because you realize that the risks of being run over are minimal and that you need to get places more than you need to stay where you are.

Self-doubt comes when we forget that we are human. It comes when we start to believe our own hype about being exceptional (everyone’s exceptional so that’s normal anyway) and we start to see ourselves as infallible or worse we start to believe that we cannot afford to fail and then we worry that we can’t live up to the ridiculous image of ourselves we have built in the far reaches of our minds. When you see yourself clearly, you don’t need to doubt yourself, you can deal with things as they are, not how you might want them to be.

People without self-doubt ask “what’s the worst thing that can happen here?” and conclude that in most cases the answer is either “not a lot” or “a lot but most of it is outside of my own control, so why worry?”

    Nicholas Barang

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    Writes for a living, writes on Medium for giggles. Mocking the emerging cult of digital nomad lifestyles and offering an alternative. No sacred cows.

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